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05 Des, 2021 Posting Komentar

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Nov 30, 2020 Frank rated it really liked it

Street gangs are generally viewed as a problem plaguing people of color, and young minority men bear the brunt of the negative perceptions surrounding street gangs. Mark Watson's books reminds us though, that thousands of white gangbangers wreaked havoc on the streets of Chicago as recently as the 1980's.

This book is trashy, shocking, and offensive, but it's also honest, eye-opening, and instructive. I was surprised at how good a writer Mr. Watson turned out to be. Yes, an editor would've made

This book is trashy, shocking, and offensive, but it's also honest, eye-opening, and instructive. I was surprised at how good a writer Mr. Watson turned out to be. Yes, an editor would've made the book better, but the unfiltered authenticity of unschooled writing actually serves the content well. Watson has vivid recall, a natural flair for description, a sardonic sense of humor, and occasional flashes of philosophical insight, albeit many of which I and many others would disagree with. In "The Insane Chicago Way" academic writer John Hagedorn dismisses Watson's book as "self-congratulatory." It's a fair criticism, borne out by Watson's annoying need to brag about his sexual exploits, but ultimately, academic endeavors like Hagedorn's are no match for first-hand accounts by people who lived the life, and I think it's fair to say that Watson's book has more value in the areas of sociology, history, and ethnography than Hagedorn's or other academic works have.

The poor and working-class white boys who populate the pages of Watson's book are just as "ghetto" as any inner-city black or Hispanic kid. Drug-addled, reckless, promiscuous, violent… Watson doesn't try to pretend they were anything but. He does claim that the white street gangs were different and perhaps more "noble" in fighting for turf, honor, and adventure rather than drug profits, but he readily concedes that white gangbangers like himself were enthusiastic consumers of what the other gangs were selling, and that some white gangbangers also sold drugs, albeit less successfully than the black and Hispanic gangs - who also fought for honor and turf. His book forces one to question whether violence for profit is in fact less noble than the "romantic" violence of Watson's ilk.

Watson's sojourn into machine politics is an interesting side-story that adds to this book's bona-fides as an genuine case study of Chicago life.

Watson's white identarian views make him an instant pariah, but they are tempered by passages that portray the black people who Watson interacted with in a flattering light, and often as being more upright than their white peers. As a Simon City Royal, Watson's violence was almost exclusively directed towards other Northside white gangs like the Gaylords and the C Note$. For a minority reviewer's interesting take on this book, refer to the top review on amazon.

All that aside, the book's value (and the source of my 4 stars) lies in the rare window it provides into an almost forgotten ethnography. The history and stories surrounding Chicago's street gangs are epic and endlessly fascinating, and the heretofore missing white pieces of the puzzle are essential, not only as a means to complete the story, but also to remind us that whites bear their fair share of blame for gang violence, and that white gangbangers were no better, and every bit as "ghetto" as the young black and Hispanic men who they actually had much in common with, even when – or perhaps especially when – they were fighting each other.

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